Robot Living

Eszter Ozsvald from the Center for Biorobotics in Estonia has created a robotic fish with only 1 servo called Ariel.

Eszter used a real fish as the her original model and made a cast of it.  Shown here are the electronics being put inside an epoxy shell.  She then used fiberglass and plastic resin to isolate and waterproof the electronics.

Here is what Eszter has to say about Ariel:

The end product was a biologically inspired robot fish. Instead of a rigid body, I implemented a novel material combination (silicon-polymer) that allows a flexible embodiment. The operation of a compliant tail proved to be very difficult to model theoretically: not only are compliant bodies non-linear, but the fish-flow interaction is of tremendous complexity. With the iterative approach in design, however, the result was excellent. The robot’s locomotion was surprisingly fish-like; it even left the same vortexes behind as biological fish do.

See our previous post on Maurizio Pofiri and his robotic fish.

Click through for a video of Ariel in action.

Link via (Make)

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Tags: Center for Biorobotics, Estonia, fish

The SMAVNET or Swarming Micro Air Vehicle Network is a project from the EFPL School of Engineering.

Basically a small swarm of flying robots are deployed, say in a disaster area.    The robots fly above, maintaining a rough shape and each robot is equipped with a Wi-Fi dongle, creating a large network for communications.

The flying robots also employee Zigbee and GPS to communicate with each other and for logging data.

Using ants and their search for food as inspiration, a type of swarm behavior has been developed.  Also, safety and collision avoidance have been thought of.

The critical issue of operational safety has been addressed by light-weight, low-inertia platform design and by implementing several security features in software. Among other things, we looked at mid-air collision avoidance using local communication links and negotiation of flight altitudes between robots. By providing a risk analysis for ground impact and mid-air collisions to the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation (FOCA), we obtained an official authorization for beyond-line-of-sight swarm operation at our testing site.

Look out, the researchers have been officially been allowed to let the swarm out of their sight.  The robots are finally taking over.

Click through for a video.

Link via (Make)
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Tags: EFPL, UAV

Using a nanofabric developed at MIT that absorbs oil and not water, scientists at MIT envision a fleet of Seaswarm robots cleaning up oil spills.

They also state that a swarm of 5,000 Seaswarm robots would take about a month to clean up the oil spill in the size of the one in the Gulf Coast.

Seaswarm is intended to work as a fleet, or “swarm” of vehicles, which communicate their location through GPS and WiFi in order to create an organized system for collection that can work continuously without human support. Because they are smaller than commercial skimmers attached to large fishing vessels, they are able to navigate hard to reach places like estuaries and coast lines. Seaswarm works by detecting the edge of a spill and moving inward until it has removed the oil from a single site before joining other vehicles that are still cleaning. Oil is “digested” locally so that Seaswarm does not need to make repeated trips back to shore, which would dramatically slow collection time.

The nanomaterial can absorb up to twenty times it’s own weight and the material is heated to remove the oil.  The Sea Swarm is powered by solar panels and could operate autonomously for several weeks.  Seaswarm is sixteen feet long and seven feet wide.

The Seaswarm prototype was recently unveiled at the Venice Bieniale’s Italian Pavillion.

Click through for a video.

Link via MIT.edu via (Physorg)
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Tags: MIT

Researchers at Stanford University have created a climbing robot that has sticky feet, like those found on a gecko.  A team led by Mark Cutkosky, a professor at Stanford, have created Stickybot II.

Stickybot III uses special feet to cling to any surface.  The robot also has a long tail that helps decrease the weight load each sticky foot has to bear. The feet, inspired by a gecko, are made up of tiny hairs, each about 5 times smaller than a human hair.

The interaction between the molecules of gecko toe hair and the wall is a molecular attraction called van der Waals force. A gecko can hang and support its whole weight on one toe by placing it on the glass and then pulling it back. It only sticks when you pull in one direction – their toes are a kind of one-way adhesive, Cutkosky said.

A while back, Carnegie Mellon had also been working on a gecko inspired robot.

I wonder which gecko inspired robot would win in a race?

Click through to see Stickybot III do his Spiderman thing.

Stanford News & Stanford Biomimetics Lab

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Tags: Stanford University

Researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology  in Malaysia have taken home the silver medal at the Malaysia Technology Expo.

Shown here are two of the inventors, Professor Nazim Mir-Nasiri and Associate Professor Manas Kumar Haldar.  Dr Chai Almon Wei-Yen and teaching assistant Hudyjaya Siswojo also worked on this project for over a year.

Measuring only 37cm x 18cm, the Window Climbing and Cleaning Robot, or WCCR in short, is a portable miniature robot that is capable of climbing windows with the aid of eight suction-cups on its body from which it attaches itself on windowpanes.

As it moves up and down in a zigzag fashion, sponges on the back and front of the robot clean the windowpanes.

The aid of an on-board electronics circuit gives it automated movement.

See our previous post about Winboni, a window washing robot from Michigan State University.

Photo from Swinburne University press release.

Link via (Borneo Post)

Tags: malaysia, robot, university of swinburne